The Silver Bridge

by Gray Barker

  “That was a great meeting,” Timothy Green Beckley broke the silence. “I really didn’t expect to see the creature, but after all, we talked with a lot of people who did see it.”

  “Yes,” agreed Jim Moseley.

  “I liked the way the people there were so friendly,” Mark Samwick added, “and I also liked the old factories, what there was left of them.”

  “Here’s where Long John started out,” Jim reminded the group (he referred to Cartaret, N.J., the site of the WOR-Radio transmitter, from which John Nebel began his famous all-night all-talk show).

  The earlier talk and gaiety of the beginning of their homeward trek had worn off. All three appeared to be very tired. They probably were looking forward to getting home, and catching up on their sleep.

  Barbara then saw the beginnings of the city. The skyscrapers. The factories. The apartment houses, row on row. The suffocating sameness. The crowded madness.

  She sat back and closed her eyes. Once again the spectre of the vast abandoned powerhouse came into her mind. She had feared its emptiness then. She had worried that the Mothman might jump from the cavernous depths of a rusting boiler. In her memory she was once again inching her way through the glut of broken window glass on the floor.

  She unclasped her black hand which had secretly held the object for most of the twelve-hour trip, and looked at it again. The others would not notice this small idiosyncracy for they had taken to “acting the fool” (as they would say in North Carolina) again. Two of them parodied the old “Batman” television theme song, substituting and singing, “Mothman! Mothman! Mothman!” One of them discovered an inch of liquid in the wine bottle, and waved it high.

  Barbara opened her hand wider to look more closely at the feather. It was white, mostly, with grayish tinges. When she held it at an angle it took on a metallic sheen. It was strong, yet delicate. Once home, she would put it away, and could take it out and look at it whenever she got into one of these moods.

  She began humming. For the first time she could remember some of the melody the strange, gaunt man was singing. She had chanced to peer into a darkened corner of the old abandoned power plant and had seen him hiding there. He hadn’t seen her, she was certain, for he had been busily regarding the others on a lower level.

  As he watched them, he quietly hummed and half sung the tune, which sounded something like the Gone With The Wind record. She couldn’t catch any of the lyrics—he sounded as if he were singing, “Loo-loo-loo,” instead of words. He was weeping, why she did not know.

  CHAPTER 17

  PSEUDOTRITON RUBER RUBER

  The compelling visage, with its penetrating eyes, and a batrachian-like opened mouth displaying large teeth, confronted me in the darkness.

  I let out a cry and fell backward into the water. My two nephews retreated wildly, then prepared for a counter-attack. Holding their battery powered lantern in front of them, they advanced, while chanting a song I confess I had made up and taught them:

  “Dracula, Count Dracula

  You’re only a big bat!

  Once we say the magic words,

  You’ll run just like a rat…

  Joey and Donny stealthily approached, heroically to my rescue. I had thought up the little song when the children, aged 8 and 10 respectively, had been frightened by an old Universal horror film potboiler on TV.

  Already a gaunt man, with a commanding and almost croaking kind of voice, had grasped me and was helping me from the stream, amid many apologies.

  “I assure you, my friend, I am not Count Dracula. I am a professor, sir, at one of the leading colleges in a neighboring state. I am Professor Gross, and I am extremely sorry to have discomfited you!”

  The bait hunt had for me come to an undignified end. An older brother had promised the two children a trip to the Sutton reservoir the next day, and they had enlisted me to help them seine for minnows and crawcrabs.

  The watery search, in the small tributary of Cedar creek, had been delayed until after nightfall by the sudden arrival of another relative and the screening of some home movies I had at last remembered to bring from Clarksburg to my brother’s home in the country.

  “And what are you seining for?: I finally got around to asking Professor Gross, who had sat down on the creek bank with us and was searching through a container.

  “Pseudotriton ruber ruber, and I have found him!” he replied enthusiastically. He displayed a small salamander which looked just like so many of the small creatures we found in our bait.

  “A what?” I asked.

  “That’s just a salamander,” Joey corrected. “That’s no ‘roobey roobey’ stuff. But that sounds real groovey!”

  “Pseudotriton ruber ruber,” Professor Gross repeated. “Oh yes, my dear young fellow, you are correct: this is a salamander, but a comparatively rare salamander for this area. I am doing research on the distribution of this particular species through West Virginia, Maryland, Kentucky, and…(he paused) I’m sure this is utter nonsense to you and probably to most everybody.

  “Maybe it’s just that I’m—to use a term my students employ—'hung up’on salamanders. Or maybe I should say that it’s ‘my bag’. Anyhow I’m not as far gone as a colleague of mind, who discusses what he calls the occult tradition of salamanders when I bring up the general subject. He calls the salamander an elemental, or a god of the flame. Sometimes I think I should have stuck with my minor field, ornithology.”

  We invited Professor Gross into the house for some coffee while I dried out. Taking a lead from the mention of his friend who evidently was interested in offbeat subjects, and his own interest in ornithology, I asked if he had heard of the Mothman stories, and indeed he had.

  “What about the West Virginia University professor—I believe he is Dr. Robert Smith,” I inquired, “who said that Mothman was probably a Sandhill crane?”

  He remained silent for many seconds, as an ecstatic smile softened his hard facial features.

  “Ah, a most beautiful bird, indeed!”

  The batrachian voice took on a muted quality, as he described the creature:

  “It stands almost as tall as a man, with its feathers a slate gray. Yes, I suppose it might be mistaken, in the dark, for a monster of some sort. But that is not likely. The bird is rarely seen east of the Mississippi, except in Florida. It breeds and lives mainly in Canada—though I do hear now that the population is increasing in the Midwest. They would not winter here of course; instead they would go to a warm climate. Their winter habitats are mainly reported in Southern California, in Mexico, and along the Gulf Coast, in that order.”

  “What about the red, hypnotic eyes the witnesses reported?” I asked him.

  “Oh I don’t know about ‘hypnotic’. That might be the imagination of the witnesses. The crane’s actual eyes are not large, but there is a large, bright red fleshy ring around them, something like a turkey gobbler’s snout. I suppose that car lights shining on the bird could reflect from the big red circles around the eyes. They wouldn’t necessarily be reflective, but still this could be misinterpreted by a frightened person.”

  Although the Sandhill crane flew at a relatively fast rate of speed, the professor pointed out that it certainly couldn’t approach the speeds reported in some of the Mothman accounts he had read.

  “The Sandhill would not attack a person or follow a car, to my knowledge, though if you cornered him he could be very fierce.

  “Very fierce. Very fierce,” he repeated. “It has a long dagger-like beak which can become a dangerous weapon when the great bird is cornered and fighting for its life. Many hunters have found this out when their dogs have attacked these birds and been wounded or killed.”

  My mind flashed back to the account given to me by the manager of a Clarksburg shoe store, who had reported one of the few daytime encounters with Mothman.

  Tom Ury said goodbye to his mother, Mrs. Frank Ury, and his mother-in-law, Mrs. Dorothy Rhodes, both of Point Pleasant, and again expressed regrets that
his wife had not been able to spend the Thanksgiving holidays with them. Deeply involved in a civic project, she had finally decided that its importance was so great that she must reluctantly sacrifice the visit back home.

  Ury warmed up his new convertible and fretted briefly about the grime that had accumulated on it over the weekend. He supposed, as it had been with his previous cars, that he wouldn’t mind so much about dirt after the novelty of the sleek machine had worn off.

  Traffic was virtually non-existent in Point Pleasant. The stop-light at the bridge, deliberately set slow in order to disgorge the traffic from the huge suspended structure which seemed to stretch almost into the sky, now seemed to be slower than ever. Taking advantage of the delay, he pushed the stick into “park”, loosened his seat belt and crouched to untie his right shoelace.

  “Darn!” he thought audibly. “I work in a shoe store and I fit up dozens of people each day. I only hope I fit them better than I fit myself.”

  He kicked the shoe off and worked his toes in relief, vowing to drive home comfortably, without replacing the “killer”. He usually crossed the Silver Bridge and drove up the Ohio side to Parkersburg, where he could take Route 50 East home to Clarksburg. But today he had promised to stop briefly in Lakin, on Route 62, on the West Virginia side, to briefly visit a friend who had just moved there. He really should be in a hurry to drive back home, but he was off for the entire weekend, and weekends at home, particularly those following holidays, tended to depress him.

  He turned on the radio and searched the dial. The strongest signal in the area emanated from Marietta, an “all country” station, broadcasting Nashville records, and he hated it. But it was better than nothing, and the song, Almost Persuaded, one of the better country music tunes, was fairly tenable. The station broadcast news every half hour, and he was anxious to hear about Viet Nam.

  But instead of the news, a farm market report came on, and he was regaled by the price of hogs on the eastern Ohio market. He turned off the radio.

  The crooked roads prevented his letting the convertible out to test its speed again. He wished he were on Route 7, on the Ohio side.

  Coming out of a bend into a relatively straight stretch of road, Ury noted a large field to his right, probably employed for grazing in the summer, but now barren and sere. He looked at the wooded area several hundred yards across the field. Suddenly an object appeared from that direction, rising slowly “like a helicopter”, he said.

  Curious about the object, he slowed the car, and peered through the rain covered window. The thing apparently was a huge bird, though he had never seen one that large.

  “I know you may think I’m crazy when I tell you about this thing,” he presaged his report to me, “but I’ve never had such an experience. I was scared, I tell you. Really scared!”

  His facial expression, and his entire demeanor, indicated that at least for a moment he was reliving the puzzling and nerve-shaking affair.

  “After it came up out of the woods, it veered over my car, and began to go around in circles—I’d say about the height of two or three telephone poles.”

  His next reaction was one of fear. He stamped at the gas pedal, and the powerful engine, in an orgasm of exploding fuel, pressed him against the seat as the car accellerated. At 70 he let up, for this section of road was crooked and substandard. He knew he was pressing his luck at the wheel, but just “had to get away from that thing!”

  He had a definite impression that it was hostile, and the feeling that it might come down through the top of the convertible.

  “I’ve never had that feeling before,” he told me. “A weird kind of fear. That fear gripped you and held you.”

  His look at the thing had been brief, as he had seen it arise from the woods and speed toward him; but in those few seconds he had seen enough to convince him that it was “unnatural”, as he put it.

  “I’ve seen lots of big birds. I’ve been to zoos. I’m rather interested in birds, but I’ve never seen anything like that.

  “It was a grayish-brown color; I’d say it was six feet in length, and that the wing span must have been at least ten feet. Its legs were folded under it.”

  To Ury, the body appeared to be too large in relationship to size of the wings.

  “Somehow,” he added, “the best way I could explain it would be to say that the whole thing just wasn’t right. I know that may not make sense, but that’s the only way I can put into words what I felt.”

  He did not see any beak, nor any eyes.

  The outside swirled by in a blur. He realized that he was approaching 80, and, coming to his senses, reasoned that if Mothman didn’t “get him”, an accident surely would. And he couldn’t be certain that the creature was still above the car.

  The peaceful expanse of the Kirkland Memorial Gardens, with its neat landscapeing, its white rows of tombstones and occasional mausoleums, swung into view around the bend. Although it was a beautiful place, and he usually enjoyed passing and looking at it, at this moment it served to further impress him of the danger of his speed. He instinctively let up on the accelerator, and as he slowed, his eye again caught the outline of the huge bird, as it veered off, apparently abandoning chase and heading toward the river at his left.

  Mothman had stretched its great wings and soared southward. Whatever the creature had been, it had shown up in St. Albans, W. Va., the next night, November 26, and there gripped Mrs. Ruth Foster in its mystical and compelling gaze.

  Supper had been delayed, for her husband was late in getting home. He had worked overtime at the small fabricating plant, and she didn’t mind such an inconvenience when it would mean more pay that weekend. Though the family lived frugally, she found it difficult to make ends meet.

  As she finished the dishes, Mr. Foster glanced at the wall clock. It was five ‘til eleven. She hadn’t realized it was that late. The clock was near the kitchen door, and it reminded her to look out and check on the weather.

  The view outside, usually depressing, with its rows of dingy, nondescript houses, most of them in need of repair, and a garish neon sign over a bar, would be even starker on this cold November night.

  She didn’t open the door, for it was one of the “old fashioned” kind with a window at the top. She pressed her face to the cold glass, then recoiled in horror.

  Looking directly at her was an awful thing, with huge eyes: red, bulbous, glowing more than reflecting. Even though she had the compelling desire “like it hypnotized you” to continue looking into the eyes, she escaped their gaze by covering her eyes and screaming.

  Mr. Foster ran from the living room.

  “Mom! What’s wrong!”

  “God help us! It’s the devil outside!”

  He peered through he glass.

  “But there’s nothing out there. You look again.”

  She could hardly bring herself to comply, but George’s presence assured her. Again she fearfully pressed her face to the window.

  The thing was gone. Outside was the same dreary street, the cold, depressing, drizzling rain, and the many waste baskets and garbage cans, not yet taken inside by the neighbors after Wednesday’s pickup.

  Still, she was certain she had seen this devil. She began to recall the few other details, besides the eyes, she had hurriedly noted. It must have been taller than her husband, who stood about 5’10”, for she remembered she had looked upward at the eyes. She also remembered a white body with what she termed “close feathers”. A huge set of folded wings and a “peculiar face” were the only other details she could recall.

  Her sister, who lived in the adjacent house, suddenly appeared at the door, again frightening Mrs. Foster, not yet recovered from her initial shock. She banged on the door.

  “Let her in,” George urged, and Mrs. Foster told her in halting phrases what she had seen.

  “I’ll sic Old Ringer after it,” her sister promised, and ran back home. Mrs. Foster could hear her calling the dog.

  “Here, Ringer! Here, Ring
er! Here, Ringer!”

  She reappeared at the door.

  “That cowardly dog! He won’t come out! I guess he’s fed too good. That hound is his under the dresser, and he won’t come out for nobody!”

  At about eight the next evening, a neighbor girl, 13-year-old Shelia Cain, was going to a neighborhood store with a friend and came running home screaming. Passing an auto junkyard, they saw a huge bird-like creature standing in front of one of the skeletonized vehicles. They described it as “gray-and-white-looking”, and it, too, displayed glowing eyes. They saw no other details, and they also emphasized the red eyes, which “seemed to stare right through” them.

  I regarded Professor Gross more carefully while he had cake and coffee. He gave me the impression of a man totally devoted to his disciplines of research, but who had neglected some of the niceties of life. He wore a suit which did not fit. Wading boots added to the oddness of his appearance. Although I tried to draw him into other conversational areas, he limited his comments to only the subjects in which he was apparently deeply interested: biology and ornithology. Nor did he talk down to us, as he continually interspersed his discourses with scientific and technical terms I could not come to grips with. Yet he seemed to fascinate Joey and Donny, who sat on the floor before him with rapt attention, though I knew they understood little of what he was saying. Maybe this was because he directed most of his conversation to them. Anyhow they remained completely quiet, and almost motionless, a condition rare for the two boys.

  I assumed the Professor had no children, and had never married, for he wore no rings of any kind. As I was speculating on this matter, Joey breaking his silence, asked the question I had civilly withheld.

  “Do you have lots of kids like my dad has (he is one of a very large family)?”